The Gentlest Touch
by kwritten
Summary: the signal's subtle, we pass just close enough to touch no questions, no answers, we know by now to say enough with only simple words, with only subtle turns


**Title:** The gentlest touch  
**Rating:** NC17  
**For:** Elena Gilbert Comment!Ficathon  
**Prompt: **___the signal's subtle, we pass just close enough to touch  
no questions, no answers, we know by now to say enough  
with only simple words, with only subtle turns ___  
**Characters/Pairings:** Elena/Damon  
**Wordcount:** 2099  
**Summary:** Remember being sixteen - and the lightest touch being so charged? Elena tries to study, Damon makes it impossible.

Elena sat on the comfortable leather couch in the boarding house, her legs thrown indelicately over Damon's lap. She was studying ... or, she was waiting for Caroline, as Damon's long fingers drew circles around her knees.

_Isn't that what what she said when she had rang the doorbell? The old practice, the old ritual that she still clung to. She could just walk in - she did own the place, it wasn't some sort of bizarre, teenage power-trip - she could always just walk in. It wasn't like they couldn't hear her coming. It wasn't like he couldn't smell her, like she didn't purposefully walk slowly, lingering with each footfall on her way to the door, giving him time._

She had asked for Caroline - at the Salvatore home - which made sense, in that way that excuses you make up for the sake of other people always make sense until you are quite sure the person questioning you is insane. _Why can't you see the logic, you want to scream._ She was out hunting with Stefan. She said to meet her here. And Damon had only raised his eyebrows and raised his glass in salute, closing the door behind her and following, like a stray cat, all the way to the couch. How her legs ended up wrapped over his, she would refuse knowledge of. Why his fingers danced over her leg, she would insist never happened.

_When she passed him, so closely, in the hall by the door, she noticed instantly that the hair closest to his neck was wet and curling disobediantly. He smelled of moisture and the bodywash she had once brought over for Stefan. Once, when they were so happy and in love and she brought him things out of habit. He had never used it - only that once, out of deference to her taste - but it hadn't been quite right. His smell and the subtle, masculine fragrance had counter-acted, had muted each other almost out. She had grasped at his shoulders and breathed him in as he entered her slowly, carefully - too carefully - but had smelled nothing. She had gasped the way he wanted her to, she had moved the way she knew he liked her to, and afterward she showered alone._

And now she was sitting on the couch, with a large Algebra textbook weighing down her thighs, pushing them downwards, as Damon softly rubbed her knees, her shins, sometimes wandering closer, underneath; sometimes teasing her, but always moving.

And he smelled like the bodywash she had bought Stefan.

_Damon was the only one who used it now. The first time she had noticed, he came into the room while she was talking to Stefan, her fingers lazily playing with his hair, and the scent was an onslaught. On that day, like today, he had just stepped out of the shower before calmly making his way downstairs. That day, like today, his hair was still just slightly wet, clinging and curling at his neck. On that day, her breath had hitched ever so slightly as he leaned over her to lightly pick up something on the table behind her, his arm and shoulder coming so close to her face, that she had been forced to lean closer to Stefan, but the scent hit her like a battering ram. Only Stefan didn't notice. And Damon didn't even raise his eyebrows._

Elena grew restless, figity, under Damon's fingers - but was frozen in place. She stared down at the textbook, Algebra would not get done under these circumstances. With Damon's hand lightly playing her like a piano, growing ever more reckless, reaching towards her, while his face remained motionless, the dark liquid in Damon's hand ever decreasing. She threw the Algebra book on the coffee table and pulled out the novel she was supposed to have finished for English the following Wednesday. It was a long shot, but it was only a small paperback that she could hold in her hands, it didn't cover her thighs the way Algebra had. Elena silently, and immaturely - but she was pretty okay with that, cursed the makers of all mathmatical textbooks; didn't the writers know that her legs needed to be free to the touch?

_Shortly after the first night Elena had spent in Stefan's bed, she noticed slight changes to his bathroom. She thought, so lovingly at the time, that he was making space for her. Letting her into his world. She realized only later that Stefan didn't know a Target from a hand towel... Practicalities of life escaped Stefan. Toilet paper, soap, cleaning supplies, towels, laundry detergent, shampoo - Elena was quite sure that Stefan believed these items appeared out of mid-air. Damon did all the shopping - and did that surprise anyone, really? And after Elena became a fixture in Stefan's shower, Damon began experimenting - buying and replacing and buying again all sorts of shampoos, body wash, shaving cream - trying to find a scent. He seemed keen on plumeria for a while, and then rosewood (which irritated Stefan and became somewhat of an inside joke, just between Damon and himself), finally settling on night-blooming jasmine. Then it was everywhere. Shampoo, lotion, bodywash - Elena floated on a cloud of jasmine. _

Elena was very sure now, that he was doing it on purpose, that he was teasing her. And found herself rather okay with it. His fingers grazed the inside of her thigh, the underside of her knee, the roundness of her shin. She began to pulse almost with the rythm he was playing on her legs. She wished momentarily that she had worn running tights, or yoga pants, instead of thick denim; and then his thumb lightly grazed the zipper of her jeans as his hand passed from along her quadracept to dance lightly down the side of her outer thigh. The light touch sent a chill up her spin; a touch like that over thinner material, she contemplated, would have so much less of a thrill. She turned the page in her novel and cleared her throat, attempting to disguise her shortness of breath. But he never broke, just continued his long, twirling pattern with one hand, the other now holding it's own reading material.

_Once or twice, Damon would purposefully use the jasmine-scented bath products and parade around the mansion, wet and satisfied as Stefan watched his every move from under a furrowed brow. _

Elena thought dreamily now, as Damon's hand drifted further up her legs and she shifted - ever so slightly - to give his questioning fingers easier access, of his hands doing their own work on his own body while showering in a jasmine-thick steam. His fingers were dancing over her legs now, tapping softly instead of rubbing. She turned the page.

_Once or twice, after Stefan was through and Elena felt wrung out, she would shower alone in the large bathroom down the hall. She told herself that it was so Stefan could sleep. Alone, she would wrap herself in her own hands and allow herself a release she was unable to find with him. She thought of nothing, allowed her mind to go blank; using her own long fingers and the utilitarian shower-head that detached from the wall to finish what he started. Others, she knew, had elaborate fantasies and dreams that kept their hands moving steadily. In the shower at the end of the hall, surrounded by the scent of jasmine, Elena felt no shame. Occasionally, she allowed herself to cry out as she sank to the floor of the shower, her knees giving out. She knew that cry was the same as emotional blackmail, "So screw me" she would think to herself. And afterwards, wrapped in the blue, fluffy robe with her initials _embroidered _on the sleeve, she would open the door and find Damon standing in silhouette, the light from his bedroom obscuring his features, an empty glass in his hand. Sometimes she nodded, he usually did - a slow salute to what they both knew she did, alone in the shower at the end of the hall - before she padded back to Stefan's four-poster bed and slipped, naked and sated, between the sheets, throwing her damp leg over his and falling asleep nestled in the crook of his shoulder._

Damon interrupted her thoughts, pulling harshly on her shoelaces and ripping her blue Converse low-tops off her feet. "Feet on the couch, Elena?" His mouth made a soft _tsk tsk_-ing sound, like an old grandmother in a church. The sound didn't match the feeling in her chest when she felt, as he adjusted her legs to dispose of her shoes, the warm, persistant presence of his own erection that gently pressed into her calf for half a second. Her mouth went dry and she thought momentarily what it would mean to kick his hands away, to straddle his hips, and feel that warmth close to her own as she tasted his mouth. But she didn't. She smiled at him as he busied himself with her rudeness. She smiled down at her novel as they both pretended to be unaware of the other's obvious arousal.

_Sometimes, Elena would almost gather up the courage to ask Caroline about ... Damon. Only she always thought that if she disguised the questions as ones about boys in general - size, shape, features, likes, dislikes - that she could somehow trick the information out of her. Caroline had a werewolf boyfriend, after all, surely she could at least give a girl tips. Everyone knew Tyler was ... possibly the correct term was insatiable. Elena chose "energetic" in her own mind. But then there was always Bonnie there and somehow - somehow talking about boys in front of Bonnie, whom she had watched go upstairs with her own brother more times than she liked to remember, seemed indelicate and spooky at best. So she followed Caroline's lead and pretended to be as celibate as a mouse when Bonnie was in the room. They two had dated vampires, had sex with not-quite humans. There was no reason to swap stories with Bonnie there, who couldn't know. Who would look at them with her bright, brown eyes in dismay, shock, horror... Or not. The "not" was more nerve-wracking than the reverse. So Elena kept her mouth shut. Even though she was dying to know._

Once the shoes were properly on the floor, tucked under the couch, Damon's hand gently moved under the cuff of her jeans and began drawing lazy circles on her bare calf. The touch of skin on skin was like an electric shock. Elena closed her eyes and focused on the movement of his hand, the light touch of his perfectly manicured fingernails grazing against her sensitive skin. And she thought to herself of times when the exposure of a woman's ankle was shocking - and remembered that Damon had lived a human life in such a time - both thoughts, colliding on a wave of sensation, made her dizzy. She licked her bottom lip unconsciously and hoped, oh she hoped, that Caroline and Stefan would be out hunting for at least a little while longer.

The movement stopped. She opened her eyes and looked over at him. Damon rested his palm against her breastbone, just beneath her collarbone.

She had never been so aware of her body and all its intimately necessary little parts. Her anatomy instructor would have been so proud.

"You're flushed," he said, his hand cool against her warm breast. She raised an eyebrow. "I'll get you some water."

And so he left her on the couch, in the dark, in front of a crackling fire, with a sultry 1930's soprano piping through speakers in the distance swallows of the house, and she smiled. Somewhere in the house, she heard the sound of a shower being turned on.

An hour or so later, when a triumphant Caroline bounced through the doorway, she found Elena sitting on the carpet before the fire, drying out her long hair with her fingers as Damon read - innocently - on the chair behind her. Elena laughed and shrugged, "I went for a run before coming over and _apparently_ smelled like a boy's wrestling team." She shot Damon a scowl, who merely nodded and asked after the hunt.


End file.
